Adventure and emotion combine beautifully in one of the most visually extravagant animations yet, says Robbie Collin

If science were ever able to blend Monsieur Hulot with an orthopaedic mattress, the result would be something like Baymax. The indisputable star of Big Hero 6, the latest film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, is a ten-foot-tall inflatable robot who’s impeccably well-mannered at all times, even though he and the world at large are not quite mutually compatible.

Squeezing through human-sized spaces involves much careful shuffling and stooping, and sometimes a partial deflation. In one scene, while edging through his 14-year-old owner’s bedroom, his bottom sweeps the bookshelf clean.

It’s this kind of old-fashioned physical comedy – unfussily staged, meticulously timed, and, crucially, uproariously funny – that underpins what’s probably the most visually extravagant and hi-tech animation Disney has produced to date. Big Hero 6, which is based very loosely on a defunct Marvel Comics series, is pitched as a cymbal-clash of eastern and western pop cultures – a rainbow-toned, up-to-the-microsecond story of superheroes and robots, set in a shimmering hybrid city called San Fransokyo. But it’s also a melding of old and new modes of animation, in which the tactile artistry of the past co-exists with the hyper-detailed, computer-generated present.

Credit:
Disney

Big Hero 6 is a useful reminder that pop culture isn’t only an escape from reality, but a way of facing up to it, head-on and reinvigorated

Take Baymax’s face: a white oval with two small eyes in the middle, connected by a stripe. It’s basically inert, bordering on featureless, but as Aardman continue to demonstrate with Gromit’s two blinking eyes and prehensile brow, great animators can say almost anything with next to nothing. The art-form has become so caught up in the race to photo-realness that basing an entire film around a character this pared-down feels like a radical statement.

(The animated short that screens before Big Hero 6, called Feast, is even more of a boundary-pusher: it’s the story of a cute little dog’s relationship with its master, composed entirely from shots of the food they eat together. It’s conceptually brilliant, adorable, and completely heartbreaking.)

Beside all this, Big Hero 6’s plot looks more conventional. Baymax and his human pal, a 14-year-old engineering whiz called Hiro Hamada, investigate the suspicious death of Hiro’s elder brother and Baymax’s creator, Tadashi, in a laboratory fire.

A strange man in a black cloak and red-and-white kabuki mask is involved somehow, as is a swarm of hypnotically animated drone ‘microbots’, each one no bigger than a split-pin, created by Hiro and somehow stolen during the blaze that killed Tadashi. While the story centres on Hiro and Baymax’s friendship – a classic Disney surrogate-big-brother relationship in the Baloo-Mowgli style – as the title suggests, four more heroes end up helping out.

The third, fourth and fifth are Gogo, Wasabi and Honey Lemon, Tadashi’s former lab partners, each of whom has an engineering specialism (electromagnets, lasers and plastics respectively) to bring to the fight. The sixth is Fred, a self-professed comic-book geek whose crime-fighting costume is a rubber daikaiju suit, and who, during various elaborate battles with the team’s masked nemesis, gleefully shouts out whatever special move he’s about to pull off – “Super jump!”, “Fire breath!”, and so on – like an eight-year-old playing with an action figure. It’s no more than a throwaway gag in a film teeming with them, but it’s a completely delightful touch.

Big Hero 6 trailer

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It’s also entirely of a piece with a film whose characters’ childlike enthusiasm, for science and super-heroism alike, is the source of their strength and grit. Hiro’s response to the death of his brother is to surround himself with robots and adventure – a vital reminder that pop-culture isn’t only an escape from reality, but a way of facing up to it, head-on and reinvigorated. Big Hero 6 counts itself as part of that honourable tradition, and as you soar with Hiro and Baymax through the clear San Fransokyo sky, you feel like you can take on anything.